Sources of Sectoral Growth in an Economy Wide Context: The Case of U.S. Agriculture

Growth in U.S. agriculture is linked to the non-farm economy through domestic terms of trade and factor market adjustments. With almost stable input growth, the relatively large contributions from growth in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) are passed on to intermediate and final consumers in the form of declining real prices for primary farm products. The resulting net growth in the real value of farm output (GDP) is relatively low (0.25% per annum). The decomposition of TFP suggests that public agricultural stock of knowledge and infrastructure are robustly associated with TFP growth, while spill-overs from private agricultural and economy wide research and development (R and D) are positive but, relatively small.     

Dynamic contracting under imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs

We develop a dynamic principal–agent model to show how imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs about payoff-relevant parameters, agency conflicts, and the agent's implicit incentives to influence the principal's posterior beliefs through his unobservable actions interact to affect optimal dynamic contracts. We make a methodological contribution to the literature by solving the continuous-time contracting problem using a discrete-time approximation approach. We obtain a simple characterization of optimal renegotiation-proof contracts in terms of the solution to a nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE). We then exploit the properties of the ODE to derive a number of novel implications for the dynamics of long-term contracts that alter the intuition gleaned from the previous literature. Optimism has a first-order impact on incentives, investment and output that could reconcile the “private equity” puzzle. Consistent with empirical evidence, the interaction between asymmetric beliefs, risk-sharing and adverse selection costs could cause the time-paths of the agent's incentive intensities to be increasing or decreasing. Our results also suggest that the incorporation of imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs could potentially reconcile empirical evidence of an ambiguous relation between risk and incentives, and a non-monotonic relation between firm value and incentives. Permanent and transitory components of risk have differing effects on incentives, which suggest that empirical investigations of the link between risk and incentives should appropriately account for different components of risk.     

德国公共养老金调整指数改革研究

1957年德国首先建立了基于总工资指数的养老金调整指数,该指数运行34年后,面对人口老龄化的加剧,进行了多次改革。其改革的根本原因在于:基于养老金指数化调整的公共养老金计划缴税率不断攀升及由此对市场效率产生了严重负面影响。一个国家选择何种养老金调整指数取决于本国国情、经济发展状况等因素,但不能忽视调整指数对市场效率的影响,应坚持"效率优先,兼顾公平"的原则。作为发展中国家,中国在设计养老金调整指数时,坚持这一原则更为重要。     

我国地方政府债务风险及其预警:问题及对策

我国地方政府财政风险有其特殊的历史背景和生成机理,而且有关预警信息取得困难,财政危机的表现模糊,这些问题给有效预警带来困难。不仅如此,现有的预警研究在预警理论和预警方法上也存在诸多问题,本文试图根据我国地方政府财政风险的特殊性以及现有预警存在的问题,提出相应的预警对策。     

Testing for Vertical Fiscal Externalities

The purpose of this paper is to design a test of whether the vertical external effects associated with tax base sharing among local and regional governments have become internalized via the intergovernmental transfer system. Such tests are important in the sense that the income tax rates chosen by different levels of government will generally be correlated, even if the resource allocation is optimal from society's point of view. By using panel data for the Swedish local and regional public sectors, the results imply that an increase in the regional income tax rate induces the municipalities in the region to decrease their income tax rates. In addition, we are able to reject the null hypothesis that the vertical external effects have become internalized.     

PPP的认识误区与公共服务改革

通过查阅大量国外文献,试图厘清公私合作(PPP)的家族谱系,纠正对PPP、BOT、PFI等融资模式的误解。通过论述政府采购的特征,阐明PPP不是政府投资而是政府公共服务采购。根据我国PPP的发展阶段以及政府在各类PPP模式中发挥的作用,提出公共服务改革的10项建议。     

对财政收入高速增长的思考——比例、用途与平衡

我国财政收入近年来高速增长,政府在国民收入分配中的比例逐渐加大。这种变化趋势虽然在近期内为相关财税制度变革提供了条件,但某些公共产品供给的相对规模并没有随着财政收入的高速增长而有显著提高。在财政收入高速增长过程中,地方财政能力的改善以及财政支出结构的优化仍然是重要课题。同时,为了应对财政收入增长波动,应该建立并完善相关的预防措施。     

Impact Fees and Real Estate Prices: Evidence from 35 Chinese Cities

Local governments often charge developers impact fees to finance local public goods. This has been practiced in Chinese cities for more than two decades; however, no empirical studies have tested the effect of impact fees on real estate prices. Using a panel data set for 35 large- and medium-sized cities from 1998 to 2008, we find that impact fees lead to a significant increase in real estate prices. For a given city, an increase in impact fees by one yuan leads to an increase of about 5 yuan in the price of newly-built housing; a 1% increase in impact fees leads to an increase of 5 percentage points in the housing price index and 7 percentage points in the land price index.     

瑞典核废料管理经验与启示

瑞典的核废料处置技术和管理模式都处于世界领先之列,特别是乏燃料最终处置计划更是其他各国效仿的对象.文章在对瑞典核废料处置情况作简要概述之后,重点分析了瑞典核废料管理的经验.完善的规划与系统、绝对安全的理念与要求、公众的全程参与和对话,建构了一个特色鲜明的瑞典模式,给我国核废料处置和管理带来很多有价值的启示.     

Local banking and local economic growth in Italy: some panel evidence

This article provides new evidence on the contribution of local banking to local economic growth (i.e. at county level – the Italian ‘province’) in Italy. A comprehensive data set is used, which includes control variables for social capital and human capital as well as indicators of the quality of local infrastructures and the production structure of the local economy. A linear within-estimator technique with fixed effects is applied to a modified version of the so-called Barro regression in order to address the well-known econometric issues of reverse causality and estimation bias resulting from unobserved district-specific influences.